Below is text from one section of Douglas Galbi’s
work, “Sense in Communication.” This work includes text and images.
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Appendix A

Historical
Popularity of the Name Mary

The scholarly literature on names contains some mistakes regarding
the historical popularity of the name Mary. One authority asserts:

Mary is the most popular and
enduring of all female Christian names, being the name of the Virgin Mary,
mother of Jesus Christ, who has been the subject of a cult from earliest times.
Consequently, the name was extremely common among early Christians, several
saints among them, and by the Middle Ages was well established in every country
in Europe at every level of society. It has been enduringly
popular ever since, it popularity having been almost completely undisturbed by
the vagaries of fashion that affect other names.[1]

Another authority states that use of the name Mary in
England increased slowly from the end of the twelfth century through the next
three centuries, but “suffered an eclipse after the Reformation and was seldom
used during Elizabeth’s reign.”[2] These statements

Table
A1

Various
English Name Samples

(%
females named Mary)

Birth Year, Location

Percent

Sample
Size

1200, Essex

0.9%

1407

1210, South England

0.0%

173

1270, Rutland

0.0%

206

1300, Lincoln

0.6%

1213

1350, Hereford

0.7%

576

1350, Yorkshire

0.2%

1794

1560, Canterbury

7.3%

661

1560 Gloucester

3.2%

3745

1620, Yorkshire

16.7%

342

1670, Yorkshire

20.6%

228

1720, Yorkshire

25.7%

413

1770, Yorkshire

22.8%

381

1625, England

17.0%

n.a.

1675, England

20.5%

n.a.

1725, England

20.0%

n.a.

1775, England

24.0%

n.a.

contradict the best currently available evidence about the
popularity of Mary in England.

Mary was not a popular
name in England prior to the Reformation. During the Anglo-Saxon period
in England (c. 600 to 1066), the name Mary was not used. A royal
use of the name Mary is recorded in Scotland at the end of the eleventh
century, and the first recorded use of Mary in England dates from the
end of the twelfth century.[3] From 1200 to 1350, the share of
females named Mary was less than 1%. About 1350, Mary
ranked about twenty-fifth in popularity.[4] The popularity
of the most popular name at that time, Alice, was about
22%. The popularity of Mary rose over the next two centuries, but
the name’s popularity was probably less than 3% prior to the English
Reformation (1535).[5]

The situation in Europe
varied considerably. In Paris in 1292-1300, the share of females named Mary
was 6.7%.[6]Maria and Marina
were the two most popular names in Galicia (on the northwest coast of Spain)
during the eighth to the thirteenth centuries.[7] By
the fifteenth century, Maria and Marina accounted for 8% and 6%,
respectively, of female names in Galicia.[8] In the area now
northwestern Ukraine, Maria accounted for 10.2% of female give names in
1484.[9] In Hungary, Italy, southern
France, and other parts of Spain,

use of forms of Mary may have been rare up to the end
of the sixteenth century.[10]

Table A2

Trends in Location-Consistent
Samples

(%
females named Mary)

England

Warwick County, England

Birth Years

Rank

Share

Birth Years

Rank

Share

Sample

Size

1381-1405

21

0.3%

585

1465-1509

13

0.9%

802

1513-1525

10

2.8%

109

1538-1549

7

4%

1539-1552

7

6.7%

224

1550-1559

4

10%

1553-1558

3

12.7%

63

1560-1579

7

4%

1559-1582

8

4.1%

991

1580-1589

4

10%

1583-1603

6

8.5%

1011

1590-1599

3

13%

1600-1629

2

15%

1604-1624

3

12.9%

1173

1630-1649

2

15%

1625-1648

2

17.6%

1429

1650-1659

1

15%

1649-1658

1

22.8%

241

The popularity of Mary increased
in England after the start of the Reformation. The name Mary was
more popular at the end of Elizabeth’s rein (1603) than at the beginning of the
sixteenth century. Mary increased in popularity during Queen Mary I’s
reign (1553-1558), fell during the early part of Elizabeth I’s rule, but then
rose again in the later part of it. The popularity of Mary
continued to increase through to the end of the eighteenth century.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the popularity of Mary in England was
about 24%.[11]

Table A3

Northumberland and Cumbria

Counties in Northern England

(%
females named Mary)

Est. Birth

Years

Rank

Share

Sample Size

1509-1530

10

1.8%

271

1540-1570

10

2.1%

3581

1571-1600

8

4.2%

5654

1601-1630

6

7.5%

5076

1631-1660

5

10.8%

4657

1661-1690

3

14.4%

4717

1691-1720

1

17.1%

3957

1721-1750

2

17.3%

3357

1751-1780

1

18.2%

4098

1781-1810

1

19.6%

3569

After the Reformation, the
popularity of Mary also increased greatly in predominately Catholic
European countries. From the sixteenth to the seventeenth century in Hungary,
the popularity of the name Mária increased from less than 1.6% to 6.2%.[12] In Vixen, France, the number
of females with a given name including the name Marie rose from 15.8%
(years 1590-99) to 68.4% (years 1740-49).[13]
The increase in use of the name Marie roughly coincided with increasing
use of two first names, one of which was most often Marie.
Beginning in the sixteenth century in Italy, and spreading to other southern
European countries in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, some men
also began including the name Mary in a multi-name given name.[14]

The popularity of Mary
in England fell after the Industrial Revolution. Part of this fall went
with a strong general trend toward name personalization, which reduced sharply
the popularity of the most popular names.[15]
By 1994, the most popular female name, Rebecca, accounted for just 3.7%
of female names. Mary, however, also fell in relative
popularity. Mary was the most popular female name in England from
1800 to 1880, and was also the most popular female name again in 1925.
But by 1994, the popularity rank of Mary had fallen to 38 and its
popularity to 0.6%. In mundane activities of normal life, the name Mary
was probably spoken about forty times less often at the end of the twentieth
century than at the end of the eighteenth.[16]